Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Smart Home
  3. Features

Plated plans to take meal kits from your doorstep to the grocery store

You can now head to 40 grocery stores across the U.S. to buy Plated meal kits

Lulu Chang
By

The notion of pre-measured ingredients being delivered to your door with a recipe book and a vision of a meal may have been a novel idea for home cooks a few years ago, but in 2018, there are about as many meal kit companies as there are varieties of apples. It’s never been easier to skip the takeout menus for a home-cooked meal, but in some ways, never harder for these meal services to differentiate themselves from one another. But up to tackle that challenge head-on is Plated, the five-year-old company based out of New York. The creators believe that their focus on customers will set them apart from their competitors.

Founded in 2012, Plated’s primary strategy appears to be taking a multi-faceted approach to meal kits. As Plated co-founder and CEO Josh Hix told Digital Trends, “We’ve thought from Day One that meal kits (and all perishable food) would need to be omnichannel.”

Recommended Videos

“Ultimately we’ll be meeting and serving our customer wherever and whenever they want to be met.”

So what exactly does this mean? As Hix explains, “There are just too many different ways that people want to buy and interact with food to sell it all online — for instance, deciding to pick up a single meal at the last minute on your way home from work is not a problem that ecommerce is ever going to be able to solve in a profitable way (not until there are fully autonomous electric vehicles anyway).”

Related

To address this, Plated hopes to bring its products not only to the digital sphere but to the brick-and-mortar universe as well.

As of April 2018, Plated is now available in 40 grocery stores — 20 Safeway stores in Northern California, and 20 Jewel-Osco stores in the Chicago area. And in the coming months, Plated will continue to bring its meal kits to more Albertsons-owned locations across the United States. By the end of the year, you should be able to buy these pre-packaged kits from Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco, Shaw’s, Acme, Tom Thumb, Randalls, United Supermarkets, Pavilions, Star Market, and Haggen.

Plated is also looking to up its convenience game by offering delivery of its meal kits in as little as two hours by way of Instacart, as well as the option to order online for in-store pickup via Albertsons Companies click-and-collect service called Drive Up and Go.

“Being in stores allows us to offer other ways to buy,” Hix said. “Ultimately, we’ll be meeting and serving our customer wherever and whenever they want to be met.”

Josh Hix, co-founder of Plated

Much of this flexibility, Hix said, comes from the wide appeal of meal kits like Plated.

“It turns out that our customer isn’t just one demographic,” he said. “They live all over the U.S. (many of our best markets are not on the coasts), are all ages and lifestyles, and are really defined by their love of food. We’re for people who want to create delicious, distinctive dinners that encourage discovery in the kitchen and amazing experiences around the table.”

We don’t believe meal kits services are ‘complete’ until you can buy them anywhere

Of the many meal kits on the market, Plated may just take the cake when it comes to levels of customization. While others may differentiate solely between meat-eaters and vegetarians, Plated also offers seafood-only recipes, low carb diet options, stovetop-only preparations, low-calorie meals, and other preferences (spicy, gluten-free, etc.). In fact, there are 20 different meal choices offered each week.

“In food, it’s all about understanding and meeting the needs of your customers in an excellent way, every time,” he said. “We don’t believe meal kits services are ‘complete’ until you can buy them anywhere and anytime you want, and have the recipes personalized to your family’s tastes and needs.”

Of course, as convenient as meal kits may be, being a foodie and being environmentally conscious often goes hand in hand. And folks at Plated appear to recognize the conundrum that presents. After all, the sheer amount of packaging that comes in a meal kit is enough to alarm even the most casual environmentalist. But Hix said that his company is seeking to make changes to minimize packaging by doing things like using refrigerated trucks or using smaller containers for in-store products.

plated meal steak and spinach

“Minimizing waste is a top priority; this is an ongoing effort for our brand and we’re fully committed to it,” he said. “It is important to us, and we know it is important to our customers. For customers at home, we help avoid waste in the kitchen by pre-portioning the ingredients to deliver just what’s needed to make dinner and we minimize waste in the supply chain through predictive analytics.”

As rosy as this all sounds, Hix seems well aware of the challenges ahead, and the difficulties associated with being one of many comparable product offerings.

“We’re not the fastest and cheapest [meal kit] — we think there are great meal replacement options out there for those occasions,” Hix said. “We’ve invested a lot in our technology and data science over the years to personalize the cooking experience for each customer and to guide them through a journey of discovering new food.”

Updated on April 5: Plated meal kits are now available in 40 grocery stores.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Lulu Chang
Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
The eMeals vegan meal kit uses your local grocery stores for ingredients
eMeals

Going vegan might be easy on the planet, but it's not always easy on you. From the high cost of vegan products to the hidden animal-based additives in just about every food, it can be hard to make the switch to true veganism. Luckily, you don't have to brave the food landscape on your own. eMeals has now introduced a new vegan meal kit that promises to deliver more vegan choices at half the cost of traditional meal kits.

Promising an average cost of just $3.50 a serving, eMeals' new vegan kits aren't exactly what you're accustomed to. Aside from the obvious absence of meat, dairy, and anything else derived from an animal, an eMeal meal kit doesn't send a bunch of prepackaged ingredients to your door. Instead, it relies on grocery stores (either of the physical or digital variety) to provide the ingredients. With an eMeals subscription, you'll get creative, plant-based, animal-free dinner menus that rotate on a weekly basis; each of these menus comes with an automatically generated grocery list that you can either use to self-shop or send to AmazonFresh, Walmart Grocery, Kroger ClickList, or Instacart for either curbside pickup or home delivery.

Read more
Save time and money on dinner with the Dinnerly meal kits
DINNERLY

Saving money generally seems to be the rationale behind cooking at home, but if your cooking is contingent upon meal kit deliveries, you may not be saving all that much money after all. With per person prices sometime rivaling restaurant and takeout tabs, it's not always clear why you'd dirty up your kitchen if it's not even good for your wallet. Luckily, Marley Spoon is here to help. The global meal kit company has just announced the expansion of its truly affordable offering, Dinnerly. With meals priced at just $5 a person, this is one kit that really will go easy on your bank account.

Dinnerly made its debut on the West Coast in June 2017, and in the last few months, has quickly grown to cover a greater proportion of the American populace. After all, we're all united in our desire to eat well and for cheap. By August, Dinnerly's territory had expanded to include most of the Midwest and the South, and now, Dinnerly can also be found in the Northeast, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, District of Columbia, and Pennsylvania. With this latest slew of states, the company claims to cover 92 percent of the U.S. population.

Read more
You can cook dinner in 15 minutes thanks to Gobble meal kits
Gobble

We may still have some interest in relaxing around a dinner table, but relaxing around the kitchen? Not so much. Capitalizing upon our desire to spend as little time as possible slaving away over a hot stove is Gobble, a meal kit service that prides itself on efficiency. With dinner kits designed to take no more than 15 minutes to cook, Gobble wants to get you into your kitchen, and then right back out of it as soon as possible.

Founded in 2014, the Palo Alto, California-based company has no shortage of competitors when it comes to delivering ingredients and recipes to the doorsteps of millennials who like the idea of cooking, but perhaps not so much the actual process. But where Gobble truly tries to stand out is in the ease-of-use arena. The company notes that all its kits are meant to go from packaging to your table in 10 to 15 minutes.

Read more